In modern China with its brutal pace of development, it was an unremarkable death.
Racked with disease and with no money to pay for medicine, peasant farmer Wang Puzhi waited until his family were out, slipped a rope around his neck and ended his suffering.
Before his suicide, however, Wang's life was far from unremarkable.
He was one of a seven-strong team of workers who, while digging a well on their communal farm in Yang village in 1974, stumbled across the most priceless archaeological discovery of modern times: the 2,200-year-old Terracotta Army.
The famous Terracotta Army brought wealth and glory to many, but not the poor villagers who found it
Their discovery has brought millions of tourists to Xi'an in north-western China and made many businessmen and, it is claimed, officials rich.
But for the farmers who found the buried army, the warriors have proved more a curse than a blessing.
On the eve of a sensational exhibition at the British Museum - the largest ever display of the soldiers outside China - The Mail on Sunday tracked down the survivors from the group who discovered the figures.
But instead of reaping the rewards of finding the treasures, they are bewildered at the greed and destruction the warriors brought to the surface with them.
Their farmland was claimed by the government.
Their homes were demolished to make way for exhibition halls and gift shops.
Their 2,000-year-old village has all but disappeared.
Within three years of 60-year-old Puzhi's suicide in 1997, the two youngest members of the team who found the warriors - Yang Wenhai and Yang Yanxin - died in their 50s, jobless and penniless.
Today, the four remaining men 79-year-old Yang Quanyi, 78-year-old Yang Peiyan and 69-year-olds Yang Zhifa and Yang Xinman - earn £2 a day to sit in official souvenir shops at the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor and sign books for tourists.
"Officials and businessmen have made a lot of money from the Terracotta Army, but not us," said Quanyi, who has been signing the books for nine years, having spent three months learning how to write his own name.
"We got nothing for the discovery.
"It was the days of collective farms and we were given ten credit points by our brigade leader for finding the warriors. That was the equivalent of about one yuan [5p]."
There had always been rumours of buried treasure in the farmers' village.
Then, in March 1974, while digging a well, one of the farmers, Zhifa, struck something about 15m down.
"At first all we saw was the top of a head," said Quanyi.
"Then as we dug further we saw the whole head."
Thinking he had found a bronze relic that the villagers could sell for the price of a few packets of cigarettes, Zhifa used a hammer to break it off and brought it back to the village. "Everyone was afraid to touch it," said Quanyi.
"We thought it was a temple statue - a buddha perhaps.
"We were frightened that the buddha would punish us."
Yang Quanyi, one of the seven men who found the ancient treasureIn fact the farmers had found one of more than 8,000 terracotta foot soldiers, archers and charioteers that had been buried with Qin, the First Emperor of China, in 221 BC in a mausoleum covering several square miles.
Officials and archaeologists poured into the village and began to excavate the tomb.
Over the next few years, land that for centuries had provided the village with its livelihood was claimed by the state.
Villagers say almost all the compensation paid by the government was siphoned off by officials.
With China still a relatively closed country and the tourism boom still years off, they sank deeper into what was to prove fatal poverty for three of the seven.
"Families here are too poor to afford medicine," said Quanyi.
"Yang Yanxin died of a skin disease that caused his body to rot away. Yang Wenhai died in great pain at home."
The family of Wang Puzhi, who hanged himself in 1997, are still upset at his death.
"He had acute heart disease,' said Yang Lou Cheng, his stepson.
"He couldn't bear the suffering and he didn't want to be a burden to my mother and me. So one day when he was alone in the house he hanged himself.
My mother died a short while later."
In recent years, as China has opened its doors to tourists, the site at Xi'an has been expanded.
Families were forced to move to new homes a mile away and had to pay £525 per person for the construction.
"The government has taken away our land and our livelihoods," said one villager who didn't want to be named.
"People in Yang village are simple farm-ers.
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